Extending cognition in epistemology : towards an individualistic social epistemology

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Abstract

The aim of the present thesis is to reconcile two opposing intuitions; one
originating from mainstream individualistic epistemology and the other one
from social epistemology. In particular, conceiving of knowledge as a
cognitive phenomenon, mainstream epistemologists focus on the individual
as the proper epistemic subject. Yet, clearly, knowledge-acquisition many
times appears to be a social process and, sometimes, to such an extent—as in
the case of scientific knowledge—that it has been argued there might be
knowledge that is not possessed by any individual alone. In order to make
sense of such contradictory claims, I combine virtue reliabilism in mainstream
epistemology with two hypotheses from externalist philosophy of mind, viz.,
the extended and distributed cognition hypotheses. Reading virtue reliabilism
along the lines suggested by the hypothesis of extended cognition allows for a
weak anti-individualistic understanding of knowledge, which has already
been suggested on the basis of considerations about testimonial knowledge:
knowledge, many times, has a dual nature; it is both social and individual.
Provided, however, the possibility of distributed cognition and group agency,
we can go even further by making a case for a robust version of antiindividualism
in mainstream epistemology. This is because knowledge may
not always be the product of any individual’s cognitive ability and, thereby,
not creditable to any individual alone. Knowledge, instead, might be the
product of an epistemic group agent’s collective cognitive ability and, thus,
attributable only to the group as a whole. Still, however, being able—on the
basis of the hypothesis of distributed cognition—to recognize a group as a
cognitive subject in itself allows for proponents of virtue reliabilism to
legitimately apply their individualistic theory of knowledge to such extreme
cases as well. Put another way, mainstream individualistic epistemologists
now have the means to make sense of the claim that p is known by S, even
though it is not known by any individual alone.